Armageddon Update

You think that's hyperbole, don't you?  Try this story on for size:

Mohammad Mohaddessin, a representative of the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran...claimed that, for the first time, Tehran had established a command and control center to work on a nuclear bomb and that southeast of the capital it was also setting up a center to produce warheads....

Four years ago, the group disclosed information about two hidden nuclear sites that helped uncover nearly two decades of covert Iranian atomic activity. But much of the information it has presented since then to back up claims that Iran has a secret weapons program has not been publicly verified.  

Public verification of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program.  My, but the good folks at Haaretz are dim of bulb.  Unless, I suppose, they have more confidence in NCRI's covert intelligence-gathering capabilities than that of the vaunted U.S. "intelligence" community, which is trying like the devil to pretend that the mullahgarchy is as nuclearphobic as Jane Fonda and just waiting to be our good, close, personal friends if we'll only fill the air with enough diplovomit and make enough concessions.  Almost like the CIA and like agencies have become wholly owned subsidiaries of Foggy Bottom - which they have.  Rest assured, if our so-called spooks do have proof of what is already patently obvious, they will dig a hole to the planet's core in order to bury the "verification" of Tehran's atomic treachery where nobody will EVER find it.  We can't go publicly embarrassing our aspiring good, close, personal friends, after all.

Our bosom buddy Adolph Ahmadinejad had some more kind words for his beloved neighbors down the Middle East block yesterday:

In yet another verbal attack against Israel, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the Jewish state a "filthy bacteria" whose sole purpose was to oppress the other nations of the region.

"The world powers established this filthy bacteria, the Zionist regime, which is lashing out at the nations in the region like a wild beast," the Iranian president told supporters at a rally in southern Iran.

"[Israel] won support [from the other nations] which created it as a scarecrow, so as to keep the people of this area under control," Ahmadinejad said.

Oh, yeah, it's just words, hot air from a buffoon, right?  Sure; so was Mein Kampf.

The Geico caveman lookalike wasn't the only Iranian stooge to send the Jews his best regards:

Last week, the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported that Commander-General Muhammad Ali Jafari of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps wrote in a letter to Hizbullah head Hassan Nasrallah that he was convinced "that Hizbullah's might is increasing with every passing day, and that in the near future, we will witness the disappearance of this cancerous growth called Israel."

Later that day, the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces of Iran, Major-General Hassan Firouzabadi, said in his own letter to Nasrallah that "the hero-breeding land of Lebanon... [would] nurture hundreds and thousands of such heroes... and that combatants of the Lebanese and Palestinian Islamic resistance [would] continue the struggle until the complete destruction of the Zionist regime and liberation of the entire Islamic land of Palestine."

Maybe it would just be impotent spittle if the mullahs didn't possess a growing arsenal of medium- and long-range ballistic missiles, and weren't within as little as six months of turning out their first home-made nuclear warhead.  I also can't help noticing ol' Mahmoud's inclusion of "the world powers" - a not very subtle reference to the West in general and the United States in particular - as being responsible for Israel's continued stubborn existence.  As once and future (God willing) Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has repeatedly stressed, Israel is just the appetizer; once the mullahs are finished finishing the Holocaust, we're "next".

Some Jews, at least, are not blind to the history that is repeating itself:

I am worried. Last year I did some historical research on the shifts in discourse within British, Japanese, and South African official elites prior to their use of biological weapons. In all these cases, including the deliberate distribution of small pox-infected blankets by the British in North America, the use of bubonic plague by the Japanese in China, and the use of anthrax by the South Africans in what was then Rhodesia, use of biological agents was preceded by an escalation of rhetorical campaigns to demonize and dehumanize the targeted enemy.

Amazing that they didn't mention the Nazis.  Maybe to the folks at Harvard's Olin Institute's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs that goes without saying.  I wish, though, that they'd say it anyway, as nobody else in this country seems to understand it - not even on the Right.

So I must say it again, no matter how small a voice I project: war with Iran is inevitable.  We can either undertake the mission to "disarm" that country now, assuming they don't already have nukes purchased from their North Korean allies or loosely controlled post-Soviet inventories, and prosecute the conflict on our terms; or we can continue to piss away whatever window of time we have left until the Iranians provide "public verification" of their nuclear weapons program by incinerating Tel Aviv, or Paris, or New York.  But either way, there will be war, and it will not matter whether or not we're "ready" for it.  We'll have it, whether we like it or not.

Personally, I'd rather fight it without absorbing hundreds of thousands or millions of civilian casualties first.  But that just does not seem to be the way of democracies.  I had hoped that the Bush Doctrine might, just might, change that.  Guess I can round-file that pipedream right alongside the conviction that the American electorate wouldn't forget we're at war and put the party of the pacifistic Fifth Column back in unified power.  Somehow I don't think the next "Pearl Harbor" will be nearly as relatively inexpensive yet nationally galvanizing as its two predecessors.

But what else can you expect from spreaders of "filthy bacteria" - right?